simple meal, while his family grouped round
him. When it was over, Mr. Leslie lighted his pipe, and called for his
brandy-and-water. Mrs. Leslie began to question about London and Court,
and the new king and the new queen, and Mr. Audley Egerton, and hoped
Mr. Egerton would leave Randal all his money, and that Randal would
marry a rich woman, and that the king would make him a prime minister
one of these days; and then she should like to see if Farmer Jones would
refuse to send his wagon for coals! And every now and then, as the word
"riches" or "money" caught Mr. Leslie's ears, he shook his head, drew
his pipe from his mouth, "A Spratt should not have what belonged to my
great-great-grandfather. If I had a good sum of ready money! the
old family estates!" Oliver and Juliet sat silent, and on their good
behaviour; and Randal, indulging his own reveries, dreamily heard the
words "money," "Spratt," "great-great-grandfather," "rich wife," "family
estates;" and they sounded to him vague and afar off, like whispers from
the world of romance and legend,--weird prophecies of things to be.

Such was the hearth which warmed the viper that nestled and gnawed at
the heart of Randal, poisoning all the aspirations that youth should
have rendered pure, ambition lofty, and knowledge beneficent and divine.

CHAPTER VI.

When the rest of the household were in deep sleep, Randal stood long at
his open window, looking over the dreary, comfortless scene,--the moon
gleaming from skies half-autumnal, half-wintry, upon squalid decay,
through the ragged fissures of the firs; and when he lay down to rest,
his sleep was feverish, and troubled by turbulent dreams.

However, he was up early, and with an unwonted colour in his cheeks,
which his sister ascribed to the country air. After breakfast, he took
his way towards Hazeldean, mounted upon a tolerable, horse, which he
borrowed of a neighbouring farmer who occasionally hunted. Before noon,
the garden and ter race of the Casino came in sight. He reined in his
horse, and by the little fountain at which Leonard had been wont to eat
his radishes and con his book, he saw Riccabocca seated under the shade
of the red umbrella. And by the Italian's side stood a form that a Greek
of old might have deemed the Naiad of the Fount; for in its youthful
beauty there was something so full of poetry, something at once so sweet
and so stately, that it spoke to the imagination while it charmed the
sense.